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by Nikil Saval


  Part of what made the office so unworthy of notice was the fact that clerks in the mid-nineteenth century seemed to do business in exactly the same way as clerks decades before, in colonial and revolutionary America. The typical structure of a merchants’ firm was still the partnership of two or three people, often in the same family, with the venture secured by a contract. The standard method of accounting, double-entry bookkeeping, had been developed in Italy in the fourteenth century. And the offices, too, resembled the banking and merchants’ offices of Renaissance Italy—called in America, as they had been in the Renaissance, countinghouses. In these office spaces, a door from the street would open into darkness, perhaps graced by a single window streaked with dust from the outside, glommed over on the inside with soot from the potbellied stove in the middle of the room. A high rolltop desk was where one of the partners sat; a higher desk in the corner was reserved for his small staff of clerks. The partners themselves were often absent from this scene, making personal calls to conduct their business transactions while the clerks stayed behind and copied documents, endlessly. The other signal figure of this office was the bookkeeper: the patient, sallow-faced pen-and-ink man regarding the ledger carefully through his pince-nez, whose chief source of pride was his ability to conjure the sum of a column of numbers quickly and efficiently.

  A former employee of the Jones and Laughlin Steel Company in Pittsburgh in 1869, whose office had all of six men (three of them partners, three others doing bookkeeping and clerical work), recalled the office life at the time some seventy years later: “There were no telephones, stenographers, or typewriters, and business was done face to face. A man would travel hundreds of miles to buy a carload of iron (15 tons), rather than write because he could see all the iron manufacturers, and felt he could more than save his expenses in getting the lowest price. There were probably more callers at our office than there are today … Business hours began at seven in the morning and six in the evening was recognized as quitting time only if the day’s work was finished, and it was not unusual to continue work after supper.”19 Even if the workday was long, the pace of business was almost enviably slow, as one partner’s account of a “busy” day had it. “To rise early in the morning, to get breakfast, to go down town to the counting house of the firm, to open and read letters—to go out and do some business, either at the Custom house, bank or elsewhere, until twelve, then to take a lunch and glass of wine at Delmonico’s; or a few raw oysters at Downing’s; to sign checks and attend to the finances until half past one … to return to the counting house, and remain until time to go to dinner, and in the old time, when such things as ‘packet nights’ existed [when packet ships came in], to stay down town until ten or eleven at night, and then go home and go to bed.”20

  The offices themselves were crowded and characterized above all by face-to-face interactions, as was industry in general. One exemplary office, of a New York commission house that sold western and southern produce, was only twenty-five square feet in size but managed to house four partners and six clerical workers, all men. One was an office manager; two clerks handled the major accounts, while a fourth handled the smaller ones. A fifth acted as secretary to the senior partner; a sixth was a receiving and delivery clerk who worked “from early in the morning until eight to ten o’clock at night” handling freight and storage. There was a group of salesmen who went in and out of the office to arrange transactions and a collector who processed bills and handled bank deposits.21

  But the surface continuities in the lives of office clerks masked a deeper, momentous series of changes in the structure of office work itself, which subtly began to reshape American cities and the working worlds they contained.

  The General Business Office of the Stratton Commercial School, Boston (1884). Early Office Museum

  One such change was the increasing specialization of business. The previous century had seen a host of mercantile activities united in one figure, the merchant, who was “exporter, wholesaler, importer, retailer, shipowner, banker and insurer” all at once (in the words of the business historian Alfred Chandler). By mid-century, all these tasks were divided. There were banks to handle the money, insurance firms to minimize risk, and shippers to carry goods, while merchants themselves ceased to handle multiple products, focusing on just one or two, and only on one aspect of the business (importing or exporting), while the day-to-day business was increasingly being handled by subordinate staff.22 In retail, the growth of manufacturing meant that the goods being sold (clothes, say) were made off-site, and stores simply took on the function of selling—again, with a host of underlings to record the day’s transactions. In other words, manual work was being separated from nonmanual work.23

  The separation of tasks, and the making of things from their selling, crystallized in the development of offices with clerks, sometimes completely separated from the dirty, noisy, and smelly world of “real work.” In city directories of the time, one notices for the first time companies that have factories in or near a city, with a separate listing for an office in what increasingly began to be called, and exclusively in American English, “down-town” (the first usage is recorded in 1836). At the same time, the customary word “countinghouse” began to give way to the word “office.” Even where administrative offices remained on factory property, they were often separated from the shop floor itself so that factory managers and clerks had entrances to their places of work physically distinct from that of the manual workers (and the office entrances were often prettier as well, distinguished by lintels and columns framing the doorway, rather than the warehouse atmosphere of the factory). Office buildings began to acquire their own architectural idiom, a “Greek Revival” style replete with Doric pilasters and large display windows for retail. It was a sign that the work being done within was noble, dignified, and important.24

  Another, otherwise invisible but significant distinction adhered to the split of income between manual and nonmanual workers. Most married skilled laborers barely earned enough off one job to support their families, with the average running to about $500 a year. Meanwhile, Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine estimated that the average annual expenses of a family of four, living frugally, amounted to $1,500—three times the average income of a manual laborer. While clerks usually faced dismal incomes their first year clerking, with an entry-level salary of about $50, their earning power could rise well above the low ceiling of a manual laborer’s salary, and there are plenty of reports of clerks in their late twenties and early thirties, often single men, earning as much as $1,500 or $2,000. Above all, the income difference lay in how these incomes, whether small or large, were paid out. Manual workers received hourly or piece-rate wages, while nonmanual workers earned annual salaries. What this meant for white-collar workers, in an American economy beset by intense fluctuation in prices and frequent financial panics, was a measure of stability that manual workers never enjoyed.25 A small shift in power had begun to take place. If people who “worked with their hands” still assumed their possession of the world of things, clerical workers, those working “with their heads,” were now at the heart of capitalism’s growing world of administration and direction—close to power, if not exactly in control of it.

  And so unlike “solidarity,” the key word of the European industrial labor movement that had made its way to England and America, the ethic that began to take hold among clerks was that of “self-improvement.” Clerical workers were uprooted from the close-knit world of families and farms, where knowledge was passed down from father to son. Other clerks were merely their competition; they had no one to rely on but themselves. “The man who does not at least propose to himself to be better this year than he was last must be very good or bad indeed,” wrote the merchant’s clerk Edward Tailer in his diary entry on New Year’s Day 1850. There is, he continued, “no such thing as a stationary point in human endeavors; he who is not worse to day than he was yesterday is better; and he who is not better is worse.”26

/>   Self-education became a key component separating the office world from the rest of the world of work. Entire schools—a parallel academy for clerks—sprang up in cities everywhere to assist young people with the new knowledge they needed to succeed in business. The loftiest of the heads in the countinghouses of America was the bookkeeper, who was the closest to true knowledge in the white-collar workplace. Accounting courses proliferated—usually $25 a pop, a sum that only more stable families could afford—and some offered to “watch over your work as you advance step by step, from book to book, entry to entry, and transaction to transaction.” Accounting books like S. W. Crittenden’s Elementary Treatise on Book-Keeping became widely known, thanks to their promise to “bring the subject within the grasp of any boy or girl.” Though copy clerks had to acquire their own special skills in these schools, such as the ability to write thirty words in sixty seconds—the measure of good penmanship—bookkeepers were the source of fundamental truth in American business. The numbers, after all, had to add up. So pervasive was the bookkeeping impulse in American life that Thoreau made it a chief object of parody in the “Economy” chapter of Walden, where, in order to argue the superiority of his frugal, simplified life, he ostentatiously added up his food expenses in a ledger.

  Unlike the anonymous, wide, deep, air-conditioned warrens that most workers around the world experience as their offices today, the early offices of the Western world—particularly those of England and America—were intimate, almost suffocatingly cozy spheres, characterized by unctuous male bonding between business partners and their clerks. Because of the close proximity of clerks to their bosses, they were sometimes considered by their bosses, as the great historian of the workplace Harry Braverman had it, “assistant manager, retainer, confidant, management trainee, and prospective son-in-law.”27 Or, as Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine had it, the merchant’s clerk “is to business what the wife is to the order and success of the home—the genius that gives form and fashion to the materials for prosperity which are furnished by another”—a comparison that could hardly give comfort to those who worried about the “femininity” of American clerical work.28 At the same time, the closeness belied a deeply competitive streak in the American clerk. Unlike their brothers in the factory, who had begun to see organizing on the shop floors as a way to counter the foul moods and arbitrary whims of their bosses, clerks saw themselves as potential bosses. What appeared to be an exemplary “middle-class” patience, a willingness to endure anything in order to rise to the top, went hand in hand with utter impatience. Indeed, their whininess was proverbial. As America’s finest moralist, Ralph Waldo Emerson, wrote in his canonical essay “Self-Reliance”: “If the finest genius studies at one of our colleges, and is not installed in an office within one year afterwards in the cities or suburbs of Boston or New York, it seems to his friends and to himself that he is right in being disheartened, and in complaining the rest of his life.”29 But the complaint derived from the proximity to power that a seat in an office guaranteed them. Virtually no space separated clerks from their superiors; between their position and that of the partners of their firms lay only time.

  Edward Tailer, a New York merchant’s clerk who kept a steady diary throughout his years in business, gives a vivid picture of the working world of clerks. He sounds the proper, Uriah Heep–ish tone for the early white-collar worker as well: humility masking greed, whininess masking confidence. The son of a rich lawyer, in 1848, at age eighteen, Tailer managed, largely through the efforts of his well-connected family, to procure a clerkship in the merchants’ firm of Little, Alden & Co., which was an importer of British, French, and German dry goods. Aside from the partners (Mr. Little and Mr. Alden), the small dark office consisted of a single bookkeeper, Frederick Haynes. When not delivering bills to dry goods houses owing money to Little, Alden & Co. or depositing said money in the bank, Tailer was employed in an endless monotony of filing receipts. In one entry he writes with satisfaction that his day consisted of filing three hundred freight and receipt bills. Highly self-conscious of the stereotypes of spindling weakness associated with members of his profession, Tailer became an exhausting propagandist for regular exercise and wrote several newspaper articles praising the gym he went to. In a piece for the New-York Enquirer in 1848, he wrote, “It is particularly recommended to those of sedentary habits, to undergo the training which is to be found [on Crosby near Bleecker].” As if responding to the satire of people like Walt Whitman, Tailer argued that after regular exercise “narrow and contracted chests are soon turned into broad and expansive ones, and the puny limbs of him who is not accustomed to exercise are soon changed into well developed and finely formed ones, and he imperceptibly finds himself re-established in health and strength.”30 The idea of a manly, ripped clerk has its contemporary counterpart in the health-crazed office workers of today, whose biceps stiffen and shift like packs through their shirtsleeves, though they rarely lift more than boxes of files or a planter of ferns at their workplace. The office—and the fears of physical degradation it engendered—might in fact have given birth to our modern idea of the gym.

  At the same time, the obscurity of the poorly lit office drives him to complain about the worsening of his eyesight: “My eyes felt, when the labors of the day were finished, as if I was to become blind, a cloud appeared to hover over them, which prevented my seeing distinctly those minute objects which would be presented for admission to be portrayed upon the retina. The reason which I assigned to account for this singular occurrence was that they had been strained and sorely tried by the miserable light which finds its way into our counting room.”31 The darkening of Tailer’s vision might have had less to do with the light and more to do with complaints about his position. Earlier in the same diary entry, Tailer complains that he has yet to hear from his boss over a request he had made, three days earlier, for a raise: “The answer which I have been daily expecting from Mr Alden, whether he will furnish me to draw for one hundred fifty or not, has not yet made its appearance. It strikes me most forcibly as exhibiting a mean trait of character, that a man, who has made thousands of dollars, should refuse the paltry sum to a faithful and hard working clerk, which would make him feel happy and independent, and inwardly bless the bountiful hand which could thus place him above want.”32 Tailer’s request was for a yearly salary of $150—a raise of $100 from his $50 starting salary, after less than a year of employment. Such was the salary he deserved, he argued, and moreover it was the only salary that would allow him to support himself and relieve his (wealthy) father of the burden. Alden’s response at the time, measured and calm, was that Tailer was asking too much for his position: Boston clerks, he argued, received only $50 their first year, with a $50 raise every subsequent year.

  Thomas O’Brien, notary public, sitting at his Wooton desk (c. 1900). Early Office Museum

  With Alden stalling on the raise month after month, Tailer’s list of affronts began to multiply. In several entries he testifies to the strain on his eyesight. He also complains about the manual labor he is often forced to perform—an affront to his status as a clerk who works with his head: “It often occurs to me, that it is time Little Alden & Co had a young man to carry out bundles and parcels of pattern cards, as I have now been with them over a year, and it is not creditable to myself that this kind of awkward and clumsy work should still devolve upon me.”33 Tailer, a “young man” himself, didn’t mean that he wanted someone younger; rather, he wanted a porter to do the work, which he would eventually get. The distinction that Tailer drew between clerking and portering was both class based and race based; most porters tended to be immigrants or minorities of some stripe—at least 66 percent in New York City, according to the 1855 census, while 6 percent were African American—giving the work an especially low cast in the minds of clerks. The whiteness of their collars was about more than just attire.

  Tailer’s worries over his position were common in a clerking world where the distance between junior clerk and partn
er was seen as both enormous and easily surmountable. No other profession was so status conscious and anxiety-driven and yet also so straightforward seeming. No matter how dull their work might be at any given moment, there was little doubt that clerks saw themselves, and were seen by their bosses, as apprentice managers—businessmen in training. Few people thought they would languish as clerks, in the way that it became proverbial to imagine people spending their lives in a cubicle, or how for decades becoming a secretary was the highest position a woman office worker could aspire to. Part of the prestige of clerking lay in the vagueness of the job description. The nature of the dry goods business meant that clerks often spent time in the stores where their goods were sold, acting as salesmen and having to be personable to customers. In other words, the duties of clerks were vast enough to allow them to be tasked with anything, which meant that so much of their work depended upon so many unmeasurable factors besides a clerk’s productivity: his attitude, good manners, even his suitability as a future husband for the boss’s daughter. A good clerk besieged his bosses’ emotions the way he did customers—flattering them to the point of obsequiousness, until the bosses were assured that they had a good man on their hands. These personal abilities were part of the skill set of a clerk—something we know today as office politics—and though they couldn’t be notched on a résumé, they were the secret of the supposed illustriousness of business life. The work might dehumanize you, but whatever part of you that remained human was your key to moving up in the job.

  This was also the reason clerks felt superior to manual laborers. Young men entering a factory job had no illusions about running the factory, which is why a few of them began to join the nascent American labor movement. But clerks were different from people who “worked with their hands,” and they knew it—a consciousness that Tailer registers when he declares the “awkward and clumsy work” of a porter unworthy of him. Young men who wanted to get into business knew they had to clerk, and they also knew that clerks could and often did eventually become partners in their firms. “Time alone will suffice to place him in the same situation as those his illustrious predecessors now hold!” Tailer wrote in one entry, loftily referring to himself in the third person. But though patience was the signal virtue of clerking—to write on, as Bartleby did, “silently, palely, mechanically”—impatience was its most signal marker. From the shop floor, the top of the Pittsburgh steel mill looked far off indeed. But in the six-person office, it was right next to you, in the demystified person of the fat and mutton-chopped figure asleep at the rolltop desk, ringed with faint wisps of cigar smoke.

 

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